What’s on Your Social Channel?
by Tim Dreyer on April 30th, 2012
Photo courtesy of Likeable Media www.likeable.com
The abundance of social media platforms has empowered users to provide feedback in new many ways. Because of this, we’re seeing a widening of the gap in a company’s ability to provide a satisfactory customer experience. Turning on social as a part of a customer service component can unleash a flood of information that organizations are simply not prepared to handle much less process.
However, companies can harness this social media feedback through the use of new monitoring platforms that better connect the consumer to the business. But having an infrastructure that brings multichannel visibility to the enterprise is essential to make sure the customers send out a Tweet or post a comment are promptly and seamlessly directed to the right person. Companies can no longer just react, they need to act on — and in many cases anticipate – issues at the speed their customers have them in order to turn socially-aired issued into opportunities.
Earlier this week, InformationWeek came out with an article on 5 Tips for Handling Complaints on Social Media. The first tip they offered was to use listening tools to monitor but more importantly, better manage the huge amount of information you can create trying to get a hold of how and what people are saying about you in the socialsphere. So while it’s an important step, it’s essential that the data collected is not just usable but contextual and referencable as well. Full integration into the CRM is key to making social a channel addition to existing customer service strategy.
You can read up here on how you can extend your contact center to include social.
Facebook and the Growing Impact of Social
by Tim Dreyer on March 9th, 2012
Social is here to stay. And now that the question of whether businesses should be using social media to engage with their customers has been answered, companies still face the vexing challenge of how to integrate social into their customer contact strategy.
A few statistics drive home the urgency of finding answers in the short term:
44 percent. That’s the percentage of global Web traffic that visits Facebook on a daily basis.
845 million. The current number of registered users on Facebook. It’s only a matter of time before it hits the one-billion mark; imagine having access to one-seventh of the world population through a single platform.
$4.27 billion. The total revenues for Facebook in 2011, of which $3.8 billion was generated from advertising. In advance of its impending IPO, Facebook is in the midst of revamping its advertising platform to give companies new ways to reach customers.
As companies spend more resources to engage with customers through Facebook, it’s fair to assume that customers will start to expect that the conversation should work both ways: that is, if companies can push products more aggressively on Facebook, then customers can use this same channel for customer service.
The main problem is that once one company figures out a way to interact effectively with customers through this channel, consumers will expect all companies to do so. It hardly seems fair, but welcome to the next-generation consumer.
As your business considers how to integrate Facebook into its customer experience strategy, you should assess your organization’s capabilities across three areas:
Current customer contact platform—If you have unified important call center functions to give agents the tools to interact with customers across a number of channels, then it’s an incremental step to add social. If not, you have to crawl before you walk, and that means enhancing your platform first.
Integration of internal functions—One of the challenges of social media is that it spans marketing, sales, communications, and the contact center. We’ve discussed the need to tear down the walls within your company to enable collaboration among these departments. If just one department takes ownership without involving the others, companies won’t capture the full value of social.
Customer experience strategy—The majority of customers will call the contact center as a last resort after exhausting other options. Facebook is set to become an even more dynamic source of company and product information as well as customer feedback. Understanding how Facebook can complement existing efforts can help companies prepare their contact center agents to deliver better service.
Since companies don’t have unlimited resources, how can they be effective across forums, self-service, FAQs, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other emerging channels? The answer can vary significantly by industry and type of company. For instance, an airline — for which customer service is an integral part of business strategy and operations — is going to take a different approach than a professional services firm or hospital would. However, as customer service becomes an even more integral part of business strategy, it’s imperative to figure out the right mix for your company.
If you hear a rumble in the distance, it’s Facebook coming down the rails and picking up speed. The good news is that your company still has a little time to prepare so you can jump on for the ride and avoid getting steamrolled.
Monitoring the Social Dialogue: Being a Good Listener
by Nancy Dobrozdravic on January 9th, 2012
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In my last post on entering the social dialogue with consumers, I mentioned that there are four main stages at which organizations interact with consumers through social media: monitor, prepare, respond, and measure. I’d like to take a closer look at social media monitoring—the fundamental stage of interaction—and the benefits it can offer an organization that is willing to invest in listening to its customers on a social level.
Social monitoring facilitates an enterprise’s ability to build and maintain an awareness of the social conversation conducted online by consumers, vendors, competitors, and bystanders about its brand. This effort enables companies to formulate an analysis and response strategy based on information gathered from social venues via keywords and/or more sophisticated queries.
An ear to the ground
Awareness of what your customers are saying is a good way to listen for and respond to negative feedback online. But this is only one of the benefits that social media monitoring affords businesses – and according to a recent Focus Research survey, fewer than 25 percent of users are likely using social monitoring tools to their fullest capabilities.
Organizations may be overlooking some of the most valuable functionality in these tools. Those that extract basic customer data but never delve into “higher-level” functions are leaving these tools severely underutilized. Consider taking advantage of social media monitoring for:
Competitive intelligence – Real-time monitoring of competitors’ activities as well as shifting consumer sentiments and behaviors.
Consumer insights – Mining your customer base for product and service suggestions, requests, and unmet needs.
Strategic relationships – Identifying and tapping your biggest influencers to help extend your brand, from bloggers to media outlets.
Communication/messaging plans – Setting brand positioning benchmarks prior to marketing efforts, measured against predetermined objectives.
Of course, gathering and analyzing information is only the beginning. The key to making this knowledge actionable is ensuring it quickly gets into the hands of the right individuals within your organization – which brings us to the next step in developing a truly social media enabled business. Once an organization has a social monitoring plan in place, the next step is to prepare the business operationally to take action on a response plan.
In my next post, I’ll look at the factors involved in enabling your people, processes, and environment to initiate a social media response.
Analysts See Closer Alignment of Service and Social Organizations
by Tim Dreyer on December 14th, 2011
Last month, Aspect held a summit in Chicago to engage analysts in a dialogue on emerging trends in the contact center industry. Aside from sharing the latest Aspect technology and product developments, we were able to gather insightful market perspective from some of the leading industry minds.
One of the interesting trends we discussed is that more contact center organizations are looking for engagement solutions to help them interact with their customers on their customers’ terms. The primary means to achieve this goal is through mobility and social contact.
Many of the analysts we spoke to noted that more end users of unified communications are asking for social components to solutions. UC users know that increasing numbers of consumers are using social as a means of communicating to and engaging with their service providers and retail outlets. In fact, many of those organizations are moving social media responsibility from their marketing departments to the service organizations. So where end users previously had separate service and social strategies (and separate solutions to support them), analysts report that those organizations are seeking integrated solutions.
This is consistent with the trend of permission-based marketing that pervasive social media users are accepting. Increasingly, they will provide personal information to product or service providers in exchange for targeted and relevant offers based on their profile. A tighter integration of a company’s service and social functions allows not only facilitates information sharing but also makes is easier to assign service/marketing calls to the right agent.
Do you see a closer alignment of service and social in your organization? We’d like to hear about it. Tell us about your experience in the comments below.
Getting a Return on Listening in the Social Enterprise
by Tim Dreyer on December 9th, 2011
Last week, Forbes.com had an interesting piece on the social enterprise titled “When it Comes to Social Media, How Big Are Your Company’s Ears?” In the article, Dave Gardner points out that the social enterprise is not exclusively outbound communications. Rather, it’s really about employee collaboration through social media to listen, connect engage with customers and analyze the data for improvement.
Customers no longer solely rely on the old 800 number standby to voice frustration with a company. Socially advanced organizations know that customers view a tweet the same way they view an inbound call and expect nearly the same level of response.
Gardner cites the example of Dell who, back in 2007, created IdeaStorm as a way to listen to the ideas given by both their customers and non-customers. The concept resulted in over 400 externally generated ideas being implemented into packaging, product development and more. The initiative has inspired Dell to aim for a social enterprise that will connect social media, their customer database and CRM and create quality sales leads out of the information.
However, programs like Dell’s are not produced overnight by the social media fairy.
One of the keys to building a successful social enterprise is the infrastructure behind it. A customer contact solution that combines workforce optimization (WFO) with advanced enterprise technologies can help enable organizations to build a robust and intelligent social enterprise. WFO encompasses technologies and business practices that focus enterprise resources and efforts on customer contact. Organizations rely on WFO to plan, execute, measure and continuously improve customer engagement regardless of where or how customer interactions are initiated.
This capability increases visibility into customer interactions and connects departments across the enterprise and into the partner ecosystem and out into the socialsphere. For example, speech and desktop analytics, social monitoring, and other recording tools capture, evaluate and report customer feedback and workforce performance data in real time which in turn can help identify sales opportunities previously lost.
You can read more in the Aspect white paper, 5 Ways to Optimize Your Workforce for Customer Contact in a Social Marketplace to dive deeper into the subject.
You know your customers are talking. Where are you listening to them?
Social Media: A Two-Way Street
by Nancy Dobrozdravic on November 22nd, 2011
The vast majority of today’s top organizations will name social media as part of their marketing or customer communication efforts. However, the degree of coordination these efforts receive can vary widely depending on the enterprise.
For those seeking greater ROI in social media and evidence of improved customer engagement, a unified approach to social media may be the key.
The ongoing conversation
How can organizations elevate their responsiveness and enhance the customer experience? Consider channeling enterprise-wide social contact through a single workflow to take advantage of customer-facing processes that may already be in place within the organization.
The contact center is an ideal place to focus this activity. Here’s why:
- It is already established as the customer engagement “hub” within the enterprise.
- It possesses the technology backbone to support an engagement and response program.
- It has decades of experience at customer communication necessary for transforming the customer monologue into a productive, two-way dialogue.
Approaching social media response from a workflow – or workforce – perspective sheds new light on opportunities for workforce optimization. Social monitoring that most companies employ for the purposes of customer sentiment and market awareness may have the capability to send alerts, notifying agents of issues that need to be addressed at the social media level.
Solutions that enable alerts such as these to be channeled into the agent’s workflow have the advantage of further streamlining operational processes without disrupting traditional customer contact or customer service. Aspect Social Media Channel Integration, for example, provides this capability. In addition, Aspect offers advanced add-ons to its social media solution to develop and track social media KPIs, measure outcomes from interactions, and establish benchmarks for performance.
Mastering the social dialogue
As we see it, there are typically four main stages at which organizations interact with consumers through social media: monitor, prepare, respond, and measure. In my next series of posts, I’ll show you how organizations operating at each stage can optimize social engagement, as well as harness new applications and tactics to advance the social dialogue to the next level.
The value of integrating customer contact into your online marketing efforts
by Mike Sheridan on June 23rd, 2011
Companies are licking their chops to develop online marketing campaigns to take advantage social media’s ability to reach a targeted audience of engaged consumers. However, in the rush to use these channels for branding and to tap create sales, many executives have failed to address the service component. Successful business leaders are making the strategic decision to coordinate the activities of their sales, marketing, and contact center service functions before launching a new campaign – not as an afterthought.
Come to think about it, this challenge isn’t a recent development: in the (long ago) days of more traditional marketing, a print ad containing the wrong price for an offer could result in a barrage of complaints or inquiries. Often, the contact center wasn’t informed of the special or the error, leaving them flatfooted when people started calling. Then, as now, a lack of coordination could cause lasting reputational damage to a company that was ill prepared to deal with an issue.
Two recent examples highlight the lightning-fast ripple effect that social media has spawned. In the first, Air New Zealand heavily promoted a special offer that would be available on Facebook for just one hour. The promotion was a success, with 46,000 Facebook members ready to pounce on the cheap ticket deal. When the offer went live, the volume of traffic overloaded the Facebook app, leading to confusion, frustration, disappointment, and the inevitable venting in online forums.
Similarly, Amazon’s recent offer of Lady Gaga’s album had the potential of introducing hundreds of thousands of music buyers to Amazon’s platform. What could go wrong? Although Amazon is recognized as a customer service champion, the flood of traffic overwhelmed its website, resulting in album downloads that took hours. Instead of an army of new converts, the company instead had to cope with a PR nightmare. Its second attempt to sell the album was also marked by technical glitches.
Both incidents included tepid customer service responses. Air New Zealand provided this explanation: “Hi everyone, thanks for taking the time to participate. Unfortunately due to high demand and initial technical difficulties not everyone has been able to access the deal… Keep your eyes out for more upcoming Facebook Only sales in the very near future.” How would you react if a company that had just failed spectacularly instead treated it as an opportunity to promote other deals?
Let’s learn from our marketing and service predecessors and institute safeguards to ensure that no new deals or campaigns are launched without first briefing the customer contact organization. In addition, since online marketing has a strong technology component, IT should also be looped in to identify any potential issues before launch and devise a post-launch strategy to respond to mishaps. Only then can the sales, marketing, and contact center functions develop service recovery measures so that the company doesn’t end up in a worse place because of well-intentioned promotion gone wrong.
So while the problem isn’t new and the solution seems to be common sense, many organizations have yet to adopt a more integrated approach. As these two experiences drive home, companies shouldn’t dip their toe into the social media pool without a well developed plan in the event they fall in.
Your customer is blogging about you: Why you should care
by Jane Hendricks on June 22nd, 2011
Forward-thinking organizations have embraced social media since its inception. Many, like P&G, see social media as a source of rich data―so rich that it may replace the traditional consumer panel and market research surveys that have been a staple at P&G since 1924. Now while most would applaud P&G as an innovator, there are detractors.
The main argument against the use of social media for research is that it is a vehicle for the overly negative, vocal fringe. P&G’s response? Rather than debate and theorize about what it should do, P&G focuses on what the customer is doing. Joan Lewis, global consumer and market knowledge officer says, “We will learn enormously whether [social-media samples are] representative or not.”
Now that organizations are increasingly trying to actually join the social media conversation, this argument is being made again. It is articulated by Forrester’s Paul Hagen, who cautions organizations on the danger of using social media as an escalation strategy. He asks, “Is this [social media] really the venue in which you want to solve problems?”
Unfortunately, your answer doesn’t matter. If we think about social media as research, P&G could certainly ignore social media and hope that its traditional surveys will pick up on whatever the social media conversation is about. The conversation certainly won’t stop.
This is true from a customer service perspective as well. The customer will say what they want to say when they want to say it. And other customers will read it. Posting a comment, tweeting, blogging―all have become quite natural.
In fact, blogs, which likely take the most concerted effort on the part of the poster, are growing exponentially, at a rate of 18.6 posts per second. If you’re a fast reader, by the time you are done, there will be a thousand more blogs and about one-third of them will talk about a product or service experience. When you search for a product or service on the Internet, about a quarter of the results will be “user-generated content.” This is likely to increase as both Google and Microsoft are building ever-tighter integrations between social media and their search engines.
Many cite “United Breaks Guitars” as a case study that highlights the perils of ignoring social media. It’s a nice case study with some catchy tunes. But the real case studies will be organizations that are able to apply a disciplined response to this new channel―one that translates to a measurable improvement in customer experience. Next-generation contact centers put customer service within customer reach―and today’s customers are on their smart phone tweeting and texting (sometimes at the same time).
Once we stop looking at social media as the exclusive domain of the fringe and start thinking about social media as a way to improve customer service for everyone, that’s when useful case studies will begin to emerge.
One of the responses to Paul’s blog was from the person who prompted Paul to write the blog in the first place. She writes, “I didn’t tweet about the DMV thinking they would see it and come to my aid. I tweeted about the DMV because I was pissed off and frustrated and venting to my followers. Whether the DMV saw it or not, that tweet was going to be out there in the public stream.”
Social media is a runaway train. You can ignore it and hope it will derail (it probably won’t) or you can jump aboard and try and apply the right breaks and steer it to your advantage.
Defining the role of IT in the mobile world
by Jamie Ryan on April 4th, 2011
With the rollout of the iPad 2, the world was once again caught up in the excitement of the promise of a new product. Who wouldn’t like a thinner tablet with enhanced functionality?
I see the announcement as another installment in an ongoing challenge for CIOs struggling to keep pace with the consumer market. As more and more individuals buy smart phones, tablets, and other devices, they increasingly rely on them for business. This dynamic raises all sorts of questions:
- What’s the line between business and personal use when employees are expected to be responsive in the evenings and on weekends?
- How does a company safeguard sensitive information when it has less and less control over end users and devices?
- Is IT responsible for providing technical support for these devices? …Read more >
How companies should integrate social media into customer contact
by Aspect on February 25th, 2011
David Mastronardi with the social business design firm Dachis Group wrote an interesting blog on how Facebook and Twitter are operating as shadow customer support. He cites a recent experience where he was able to get his flight rebooked during a weather delay by using Twitter instead of calling customer service. This was due to the fact that different departments within the company handled social media and customer service. In fact, the social media team was in the Communication department, not customer service. Now, he was lucky in that the person who handled Twitter questions was able to somehow change his reservation on the fly.
What does this mean to enterprises? A few takeaways.
- Consumers will increasingly use social media as a way to obtain service. In fact, it’s happening already. Social tools are the first place many people, including myself, go to for service.
- By having a non-customer service organization handle service inquiries from consumers, companies run the risk of not giving consumers the service they need. Although in David’s example things turned out great, the company is rolling the dice in terms of support.
- Ultimately, the number of consumers who turn to social channels may become as prominent as those who call your contact center. …Read more >
Improving the way companies communicate internally and externally with their customers is an important objective for all organizations. This blog is focused on levaraging the collective knowledge withing Aspect.